The future of our economy and our students’ careers is dependent on improving our students’ science education. The decades of ongoing weakness can be traced to a constant problem: the schools fail to deliver a strong science foundation in the earliest grades. This creates an educational deficit which requires remediation later on and perhaps more significantly, it fails to captivate students’ interest in the formative stage when many will decide what careers they will pursue. Science4Us, a K-2nd core science curriculum, was developed to address this weakness including the issues associated with empowering early elementary teachers to deliver exemplary science education despite them being generalists with limited comfort with teaching science.

The development goal of Science4Us is to address an additional challenge, an effective science education can only be delivered if the schools and teachers commit time to it. Today, and for the foreseable future (next half decade), the focus of elementary schools is on the highly challenging and highly measured implementation of the Common Core. However, since cross cutting curriculum is a best practice as defined both by CCSS & NGSS, this is an opportuntiy. The development goal is to research and integrate the elements for a CCSS-aligned literacy supplement into S4U so that time will be won for science education since S4U will be an effective literacy supplement.